Google has announced plans to limit the ability of other companies to track people across the internet and collect information about them, a significant change that has widespread ramifications for online privacy as well as the digital economy.

“We are looking to build a more trustworthy and sustainable web together, and to do that we need your continued engagement,” Schuh wrote.

To cut down on abuse, there's a small, random chance of any given transaction being audited.

This system has a problem. Several, actually, but the key problem for me was that an audit requires seven items. No matter how many you actually buy.

The employee interface verified that my cart contained two (2) items. She scanned both. It verified that those two items were ones I had scanned. And then it told her that she needed to scan five more items to complete the audit, because the audit requires seven items to be scanned.

In a tweet, the celebrity accused the firm's chief Mark Zuckerberg of having valued profit over truthfulness.

By contrast, Twitter opted to ban all political adverts from its platform in October. The company's chief executive Jack Dorsey tweeted that he believed "political message reach should be earned, not bought".

"There's still time to file a claim for a share of the $425 million that Equifax agreed to cough up after hosing almost half of the country in its massive data breach a few years ago," writes a Pennyslvania newspaper columnist, pointing victims to equifaxbreachsettlement.com.

"But unless you can prove you were an identity theft victim who lost money, or had to waste time cleaning up the mess, don't expect much of a payout. Victims are being hosed again."

We already knew this was coming because Microsoft announced the new Edge’s launch date last month, but it wasn’t clear that users would be pushed to the new version. Thankfully it will look mostly the same as the existing Edge browser, with all the same proprietary Microsoft features, except for a slightly more Chrome-esque look.

By developing on the open-source Chromium project, Microsoft is helping to improve Google’s browser, which it uses to collect data for advertising purposes.

Apple regularly complies with court orders to turn over information it has on its servers, such as iCloud data, but it has long argued that it does not have access to material stored only on a locked, encrypted iPhone.

And Attorney General William P. Barr has recently turned up his criticism of encryption. He said last month that finding a way for law enforcement to gain access to encrypted technology was one of the Justice Department’s “highest priorities.”

“A trip to the doctor’s office, pharmacy or hospital shouldn’t cost a month’s pay,” Newsom said in a statement. “The cost of healthcare is just too damn high, and California is fighting back.”

A plan for California to sell its own drugs would “take the power out of the hands of greedy pharmaceutical companies,” Newsom said, according to the Associated Press.

Anthony Wright, executive director of the advocacy group Health Access California, told the Associated Press that “Consumers would directly benefit if California contracted on its own to manufacture much-needed generic medications like insulin—a drug that has been around for a century yet the price has gone up over tenfold in the last few decades.”

Insight Partners – the same private equity house that pumped half a billion dollars into data protection powerhouse Veeam Software earlier this year – is acquiring the firm for an estimated $5bn.

Veeam has boasted of achieving a $1bn annual run rate – referring to a controversial accounting tool that extrapolates current results into future periods, for example by multiplying a quarter's results by 4 – and has in excess of 350,000 customers worldwide.

Rather than one single powerhouse, the threat to Amazon comes in the form of hundreds of smaller e-commerce venues that can each take a tiny, collective stab at online shopping's 800-pound gorilla.

As Loren Padelford, general manager of Shopify Plus, put it: "Consumers are coming back to [retailers] and saying, 'We want to shop directly from the makers.' These acquisition channels and marketplaces aren't all what they were cracked up to be, and they aren't giving you the customer experience and relationships you want."

Facebook said it would remove videos if it realised they had been edited in ways that weren't obvious to an average person, or if they misled a viewer into thinking that a person in a video said words they did not actually say.

"There are people who engage in media manipulation in order to mislead," wrote Monika Bickert, vice president of global policy management at Facebook in the blog.